Hey all,
So this morning, I posted a message, and it was showing the message timestamp as something like 2:something PM. I've noticed that the timestamps are off before, but I've never really been motivated to fix it. This morning, I dug in a little deeper to find out why it was doing that, having the time zone way off even though I have it set correctly in my profile.
Somehow the default timezone of the forum got set to Etc/GMT+8. I don't know how, it's not even a setting in the admin of the forum software. There is a setting for something like "Overall offset" that lets you compensate, but I wanted to know where
exactly it was being set. In the config table, it has Etc/GMT+8 as the default timezone of the board, and a quick grep on the filesystem revealed that nowhere in the source code of the forum software (SMF) can you actually set that setting. I don't know, maybe that's how it was originally installed, or maybe it's where the authors of the forum software live or something.
Anyway, I set it to UTC (aka GMT), which is the timezone of the server. As a result, it's possible that all of your times listed on posts have been suddenly offset by eight hours.
To set your timezone, click on
Profile on the top menu (or that link), then under Modify Profile on the left side, click Look and Layout Preferences. One of the fields on that page is Time Offset. Enter how many hours your own time zone is offset from UTC, being sure to add an hour if you are currently in daylight saving time. Here are the offsets for North American time zones:
-4: Eastern Daylight Time
-5: Central Daylight Time
-6: Mountain Daylight Time
-7: Pacific Daylight Time (and Mountain Standard Time, for you lucky non-DST observing Arizonans!)
Sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause, but hopefully the settings actually make sense now.
